This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

It’s September of a Winter Olympic year, so you know what that means in Toronto — election fever takes hold!

Can’t you just feel it in the air? The kids are back in school, the beach towels are stored away for another season, and that means it’s time to start paying close attention to the race to determine the city’s future. The showdown where Mayor — uh, (checks notes) yep, he’s still there — John Tory faces off against … hmm, let’s see, a long list of folks you’ve never heard of. Guess we’ll start hearing from those people soon. Won’t we?

Huh. Maybe election fever hasn’t quite gripped the city just yet. Maybe it’s just a different kind of fever, the kind that knocks you into a barely coherent convalescence. Maybe it’s more of an election coma.

In fact, it seems possible you are just learning here now that there’s a municipal election taking place in just one month, where Torontonians will vote for mayor and council.

This quiet feels kind of weird to those of us who’ve watched Toronto elections for some time. In my decades following the city’s politics it often seemed like a constant three-ring circus where every dumpster was constantly bursting into flames and where something unexpected could generally be counted on to happen. You had Sideshow Mel Lastman, David Miller’s new broom, the whole Rob Ford fiasco.

In Toronto politics, everything that could go crazy always did, even if a lot of important things never seemed to change all that much. Now, everything seems to change all the time — the skyline seems a different shape virtually every week — but the politics is bland.

Could that change? Sure. John Tory himself will know that the first time he ran for mayor in 2003, Barbara Hall was supposed to be in for a coronation (she finished third behind Miller and Tory). He’ll remember that the second time he ran — the first time he won — Olivia Chow was supposed to be the anti-Ford front-runner. We’ll all remember that in between, an apparent joke candidate named Rob Ford managed to put an end to a sure-thing George Smitherman mayoralty.

But, you know, even that history of surprises doesn’t offer much hope for long-shot candidates running against popular incumbents: remember Tooker Gomberg and Jane Pitfield? Yeah, hardly anyone else does, either.

But I suppose we’ll see. Gil Penalosa is a candidate cut a bit from the Jennifer Keesmaat mould — a progressive celebrated in the city planning world (in Penalosa’s case, celebrated by urbanists around the world after his term as parks commissioner of Bogota, Colombia) who starts with a drawer full of fresh ideas and a pretty low profile among the general public. I only know Stephen Punwasi as a smart policy guy talking finance and housing on Twitter, but he’s got a website full of proposals ready to go, a fully formed platform worthy of taking a look at. Sarah Climenhaga finished sixth last time, Kevin Clarke runs just about every time. Maybe they, or one of the other 30 candidates running against Tory will break through and we’ll see a real race.

Or at the very least a real discussion about the issues facing the city and where we want to go over the next several years. Because that discussion is obviously sorely needed.

Returning to Toronto after three years away in the U.S., I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a lot of things that have evolved — not perfectly, but noticeably. Street patios installed, bike lane networks built out, dedicated bus lanes in Scarborough, LRT lines almost ready to come into service. Even something as small as beautiful planter boxes full of late-season flowers in various neighbourhoods. Some of the new neighbourhoods and housing developments underway seem like they might actually get the streetscape right — which was a longtime problem with Toronto’s rapid development.

But talking to people, there are problems, lingering and festering at the top of mind. Basic infrastructure still crumbling (from roads to garbage bins), homeless people with no place to go being forcibly removed from encampments in parks, subway elevators not open, park washrooms locked.

And a city that has grown so absurdly unaffordable that lots of working class and middle class people feel they have no choice but to flee to far-flung suburbs. Or to, uh, Hamilton.

(Hamilton is a great place — I have had good times there, and I have good friends there. It’s just not our place. It’s not home. Except now to a lot of us it is.)

Especially now that many of us have learned we can work remotely, a lot of people who have loved this city for their whole lives are asking if they still feel that love, or if the city is still willing to show them any love back. If they can work from anywhere, what is keeping them here? And for those who cannot work from anywhere, who don’t have the luxury of picking up and moving on: what is the city doing to make their lives easier? To make their lives joyful? To make them love the place they live?

It’s a question directly for Tory, whose front-and-centre promise when he ran and won his first term in 2014 was the affordability of the city. Back then, he emphasized holding the line on property tax rates. He’s mostly done that. But is the city really a more affordable place for anyone because of it? Is it a better place?

For some people it surely is. But for many others, I’ve heard a feeling that things that are important to them are being neglected, to the point of decline. It’s something we at least want to have a good discussion about. And an election is the perfect time for that.

We just have to wake up from our coma and start talking about the city we want to live in, and demanding answers about the plan to get there.

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com